Ian Khama is waging a high intensity war against Botswana’s interests.
In his dream world he claims he sees himself as the most patriotic citizen this country has ever seen, yet latest evidence shows that he has enlisted the backing of foreign interests to help him in his coordinated efforts to upend and ultimately undermine the authority and integrity of the state.
Ongoing public anxieties over reports by a certain Mike Chase that close to a hundred elephants have recently been killed are well founded.
Mike Chase, who has often operated from the shadows is one of Ian Khama’s powerful but shadowy front men who have used access to Khama to make money from Botswana’s tourism sector at the exclusion of Batswana.
Any effort by Government to open up this sector is naturally viewed by this clique ÔÇô a majority of who are white with a rapacious racist instinct – as threatening their commercial interests.
Such efforts by Government will be resisted including by the use of mis-information, disinformation and even lies.
But still the amount of trickery deployed this week has been mind-boggling ÔÇô even by the Khama standards.
In their world opening up the tourism sector to none-whites is a life and death economic threat that should be fought and even thwarted at all cost.
Clearly there is a lot to play for in Botswana’s tourism sector.
Any attempts to re-order and rearrange the playing field in favour of citizens will not happen without and stringent push backs by the international cartels, represented by their local satellite as currently led by the Khamas.
And this much we hope President Mokgweetsi Masisi and his team appreciates.
Masisi’s few months in office have largely been interpreted as a coup by the global interests that have grown used to seeing Botswana as their cash cow.
His reform initiatives have left them wreaked with a siege mentality.
They are mad not just at Masisi but more so at Ian Khama, their local representative who they accuse of doing a shoddy job in choosing a successor who could guarantee the security of their interests.
To them Masisi has been less bankable than Khama had promised, hence strict instructions by them on Khama to do everything to undermine Masisi, including waging a political war to remove Masisi ÔÇô line, hook or sinker.
That is exactly what happened this week when this cabal used their international influence and outreach to sell their lies to all of the world’s leading cable news channels that Botswana had become the world’s leading poaching lair, a line parroted locally by their chief representatives, the Khamas.
For the last ten years, other than the country’s diamonds industry that experienced a groundswell of rising illicit smuggling activity during Khama’s time in office, tourism is another sector where the world’s white and footloose commercial interests converge.
Political power stands at the centre of this cartel’s ability to continue to control the country’s tourism bout.
Khama’s fight to climb his way back the political ladder has got to do with much more than just politics. It is all premised on economics. Sadly economic fairness is not a part of their agenda.
The battle he is fighting has to do more about these global elites than just himself and his immediate family. The real owners and indeed financiers of the fight are the global conservation interests of which he is only a convenient vassal and vessel and also a useful appendage ÔÇô albeit an imperfect one.
This is why it is all the more painful to see our venal opposition leaders falling into his pocket, rather than standing for the country and for what is right.
When Ian Khama was planning to leave the presidency he realized that he and the global cartel’s hold on the country’s tourism sector will with time become threadbare. In response he immediately started a process of planting and littering his lackeys across crucial positions in Government to ensure his continued stranglehold.
To his credit, upon arrival Masisi did not waste time to take pre-emptive initiatives to dismantle this criminal empire.
Now that many of those agents have been removed from key positions, Khama is waging a shameless war that thinly borders on criminality ÔÇô in the process literally putting what little is left of his false and undeserved credibility on the line.
The long term future of Botswana’s wildlife is not going to be secured by the use of political propaganda masquerading as conservation.
It is going to be secured by direct involvement citizens being the big beneficiaries of the fruits of such conservation.
There have been efforts by the ruling party Council of Elders to reconcile president Masisi and Khama.
With all due respect, the Elders, for all their good intentions they are barking up a wrong tree.
Their efforts should all be aimed at Khama, counseling him that his actions border on treason.
But then of course he would never listen.
If anything he would insist on a Masisi apology to him.
That is how the man thinks. In fact that is how he has been brought up. All his life he has looked at himself as something akin to a Monarch in Botswana.
In the immediate term a few but drastic things need to happen to ensure the stability and security of the state.
Government has a duty to verify if there is nothing criminal about the public alarm that has been caused by Mike Chase.
If there is, the law should take its cause.
Barring an apology accompanied by a written undertaking to the country that this nefarious activities will never happen again, his Elephants Without Borders should cease its operations forthwith.
And that is not all.
Without exception, his accomplices should also face the wrath of the law.
And if evidence also suggests that Ian Khama is among the accomplices that by law could be charged, so be it.
